Asset sales – an anarchist position

Asset sales – an anarchist position

Here is a leaflet we wrote for the asset sales protest on 27th April 2013. You can download a PDF here.

Angry? You bet! We are marching side-by-side with others who are sick and tired of greed. We reject privatisation – the transfer of functions and industry to the private sector – as it only leads to higher prices, less and worse jobs, and worse services. Given this, some view nationalisation – the transfer of economic resources (e.g. mines, banks, and factories) to state ownership and control – as a rallying cry for a socialist alternative.

However, nationalisation has never removed capitalism, nor led to socialism, and it certainly does not have a record of improving wages, jobs, rights and safety. Nationalisation, rather than promote “workers’ control” or companies’ accountability to the public, has routinely meant top-down management, union-bashing, bad services and bad conditions.

We see another way forward: collectivisation from below! We can place industry under direct workers’ self-management, subject to worker-community participatory democratic control to meet human needs and end oppression and environmental destruction. Strikes and occupations can be our collective tools for liberation.

As anarchists, we cannot reconcile ourselves to any government. The Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement is an organisation working towards a classless, stateless society: anarchist communism. That society would be run by a federation of workplace and community councils, with everyone having a say in decisions that affect them.